Incoming ... Joseph Audio Pulsars

It was a tough choice for me between sapele and maple. I chose the sapele and it's really gorgeous.

The sapele is an amazing finish.  Deep and luxurious. That's the pair I had in for demo.  (Just didn't match my decor).

I have to say I really enjoy audio-jewelry, where I look at an item with and think it's beautiful and adds to the room, rather than detracts.   The Josephs are one of those items  - for my money, the Perspectives being among the most elegant floor standing speakers I've seen.

If I were going for floorstanders, I’d get the Perspectives, too. Also, just a note that Jeff Joseph is one of THE nicest amd most helpful guys in all of hi-end audio. He's a real gentleman all around.

@markalarsen

Since you've had both, could you give a bit of detail to compare the Pulsars vs the Perspectives?

It's been a year since I demoed both.  The first time I ever heard Joseph speakers was the Pearl 3 at the Montreal show last year, playing a vocal acapella track.  I was stopped in my tracks because it wasn't simply that the sound was incredibly clear - plenty of high end speakers do that.  It was the tone and timbre - voices actually sounded warm and human in an exceedingly real way where you recognize "that's what people singing in front of me sound like."  Totally grain-free and unmechanical.

I demoed the Pulsars and found they had the same family sound, a delight to sit in front of those speakers.  Then the dealer asked if I wanted to hear the Perspectives.  I first objected because I wasn't in the market for that price.  But he set them up - a perfect "upselling moment" - and after listening to the Perspectives they utterly grabbed me.  It seemed like the Pulsars...but more of it (and somewhat more even in the mids to lower mids, as they have the additional driver and don't need an additional boost in that area like the stand mounted Pulsars do).

But I was awestruck at how utterly different and accurate every instrument sounded as they entered a mix.

Anyway, enough of my thoughts.  What are yours?

@rlb61

You mentioned your admiration for the Pulsar's cloth dome tweeter.

I agree.  It's special, or the implementation of that tweeter is, anyway.

Though all the cliches about tweeters don't always hold true, in general I tended to find metal tweeters did metal sounds more convincingly - e.g. drum cymbals.  The soft dome JA tweeters really blew me away because metal, cymbals, sounded so solid and metallic.  And yet like everything else in the high frequencies, totally pure and grain-free.   The JA speakers provide one of the best high frequencies performances I've ever heard.  Like Michael Fremer said in his review, they sound so open and extended, yet unmechanical.